Quotes About Self-discovery

A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see more ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I'd discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way.

It is in his absence I prosper.

I don't see why you're not just going for this.' Dovey looked her in the eyes, in the mirror. 'You are a rocket. You go for thing, Dellarobia. That is you. When did you ever not?' Dellarobia shut her eyes. 'When there was nothing out there to land on, I guess.' 'Now, see,' Dovey clucked, 'that's a woman thing. Men and kids get to just light out and fly, without even worrying about what comes next.

believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book

WOMEN ON THEIR OWN RUN in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she'd balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

I've tried in this telling, time and time again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful. 515

Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it's losing yourself in a crowd.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

But mother wanted to consume me like food. I needed my won room. I needed books, and for the first time in my life I needed schoolmasters who would tell me each day what to think about.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

was pretty upset about it. Getting used to all new everything was screwing with my head. Clothes, people, house. The one thing I could still count on was being an idiot. Now I was supposed to trash what little there was left of Demon and be smart. Would I still be me? And

Meglio che tutti sappiano, posso finalmente essere me stessa, meglio anche per me sapere, mo sarebbe rimasto un padre di traverso giù per la gola, tutta la vita, meglio che sia crepato, meglio adesso. Un giorno capirò se l'ho ucciso io, adesso sono troppo giovane, devo badare a non uccidere me

Whoever you are, be that person with all your might. Time goes by faster than we thought. It is a thief so quiet. You must let yourself be loved and you must love, parts of you that never loved must open and love. You must announce yourself in all particulars so you can have yourself.

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.

There is nothing more entertaining than to have a frank talk with yourself. Few do it—frankly. Educating yourself is getting acquainted with yourself. Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.

you will never find yourself unless you quit preconceiving what you will be when you have found yourself.

Lecteur paisible et bucolique, Sobre et naïf homme de bien, Jette ce livre saturnien, Orgiaque et mélancolique. Si tu n'as fait ta rhétorique Chez Satan, le rusé doyen, Jette ! tu n'y comprendrais rien, Ou tu me croirais hystérique. Mais si, sans se laisser charmer, Ton oeil sait plonger dans les gouffres, Lis-moi, pour apprendre à m'aimer ; Ame curieuse qui souffres Et vas cherchant ton paradis, Plains-moi !... sinon, je te maudis !

That in turn made him think of some poem or other, one about how you could spend years running, but in the end you always wound up facing yourself in a hotel room, with a naked bulb hanging overhead and a revolver on the table.

Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there's nothing left; it can't be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can't . . .